Tom Chivers is the Telegraph's assistant comment editor. He writes mainly on science. Not a poet - that's the other Tom Chivers. Read older posts by Tom here.

There's a really useful rule in psephology which my colleague Stephen Bush likes to remind us of. It's called Twyman's law, and it goes: "if a poll is interesting, it's probably wrong".

As it becomes increasingly clear that Scotland has voted No, it's worth bearing Twyman's law in mind. Because there was a really interesting poll a couple of weeks ago – the one which showed that Yes was in front. And, lo and behold, it looks like it was wrong.

(Still plenty of time for this to go awry, of course, and the result in Dundee has brought the running totals a bit closer, but right now it looks like the good guys have won.)

M'colleague Dan Hodges has been complaining at length that David Cameron has torn up the constitution of Britain at the sight of that one, rogue… Read More

Hat-tip to the Mirror's Martin Belam here. At 11.41pm on Thursday night – with the Scottish referendum count in full swing, and with the broadcasters talking about nothing else, and all the newspapers' main editions long since gone to bed – the Liberal Democrats have put a story out (I originally wrote that it was a "press release", but that's an independent site: still, the party has let it be known somehow). Mike Hancock, the Lib Dem MP who apologised for "inappropriate" and "degrading" behaviour after allegations that he sexually harassed a constituent, has quit the party.

He was already being replaced as the candidate for Portsmouth South, and wouldn't have run in 2015. In a sense it's not a very big story. But slipping it out… Read More

I'm going to be up all night for this Scottish referendum business. Over the last five years or so, I've done a few of these all-nighter things. The 2010 general election; Obama-Romney. Three Academy Awards ceremonies, for some reason. And, bizarrely, the Eastleigh by-election in March last year (we all got incredibly excited about that one, which sounds odd in retrospect).

They all – even Eastleigh – had something in common: the people on the telly had something to talk about. All night. Exit polls, usually, or the dresses: Lembit Opik's mint-green off-the-shoulder Givenchy for his defenestration in 2010 was particularly striking.

But tonight, there's nothing. For a very simple reason: none of the broadcaster or anyone else has commissioned a damn exit poll. So I'm watching the BBC, and its coverage i… Read More

It's actually very easy to predict the weather. You can look out of the window, see what the weather is doing, and say "tomorrow will be like today". In much of the world – southern California, the Mediterranean – that will be pretty reliable. It's called the "persistence method" and works fairly well in places where the weather only changes slowly throughout the year.

The persistence method is significantly less useful in places like Britain, though, where we have a great landmass on one side and a huge ocean on the other, and two major convection systems – the Gulf Stream in the sea and the Jet Stream in the air – pushing vast amounts of energy around us. Here it changes regularly – within the limits of "pretty boring, probably… Read More

The diamond from my wife's engagement ring. Not really. This is the one from the Cullinan mine

Nearly three years ago, I got down on one knee on a beach in Gaansbai, South Africa, and proposed to the woman who is now my wife.

Owing to a retrospectively hilarious series of cock-ups, I had failed to bring my late grandmother’s ring with me; I’d only found some bizarre brassy thing with huge fake rubies in her jewellery box. Thus I was forced to say with one breath, “I love you; will you marry me?” and with the next, “This isn’t the real ring, please don’t feel you have to use this ring, it’s just a placeholder. Also, can I stand up now? This is my bad knee.” The next day, we drove to Knysna, a lovely coastal town in… Read More

Steven Sotloff (left) and James Foley, the two Americans murdered in Syria

Steven Sotloff, a second American hostage of the sorry fantasists of Isil, has been murdered, we read this morning. And a third man, a Briton, is currently held and will, we are warned, be the next to die.

The question of how to report these disgusting acts of propaganda is a difficult one for news organisations. Do we show them unflinchingly, to lay bare the evil of the perpetrators, or by doing so are we playing into their hands? I don't know the answer, although I have my opinion.

No British paper has chosen to name the British hostage. The Foreign Office have not identified him,… Read More

There is a certain kind of person for whom the phrase “work-life balance” is meaningless, because work is life, and life is work. The body may be home with the dog and the Great British Bake Off, but the mind is still a whirr of stock options and invoices and client meetings; the clock may have ticked past five, but the working day is never over. These people are the beating heart and thrumming lifeblood of any office; they are the people who keep moving because if they don’t keep moving they die, like a great white shark, or a clown on a giant unicycle.

Those people must have rejoiced when the mobile telephone, that clunkily one-note communication tool of yesteryear, that glorified tin-can-on-a-string, mutated and evolved into the all-singing, all-dancing… Read More

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, has written a piece for The Sunday Telegraph about how Britain should respond to the "Islamic State" which has taken control of parts of Iraq and Syria. It's perfectly sensible, in the main, and most people probably agree that it's in our national interests to take steps to overcome the poisonous strain of religious extremism that is building a home in the lawless regions of those two weakened states.

But something in it caught my eye. Cameron said in his piece about the steps he's taken to combat terrorism on these shores:
Here in Britain we have recently introduced stronger powers through our Immigration Act to deprive naturalised Britons of their citizenship if they are suspected of being involved in terrorist activities.
This was proposed… Read More

Have you tried switching it off and switching it back on again? No. Because that could BREAK IT EVEN WORSE

This week a technical hitch caused websites to wobble worldwide. Tom Chivers discovers the net is held together with chewing gum and string

On Tuesday, at 8.48am British Summer Time, Verizon, a major US internet service provider (ISP), did something relatively mundane and technical: it took some big groups of IP addresses, which we can think of as the phone numbers of the internet, one of which is designated to every desktop computer, tablet or smartphone – and divided them up into smaller blocks, to free up some unused addresses. And in doing so, through no fault of its own, it broke the internet (a bit).

Major websites around the world slowed down, locked up or refused to allow… Read More

A disclaimer: I know there's nothing worse than English people patronisingly telling Scotland how much they love whisky and haggis, so let's stay together guys. I know English lists of what they love about Scotland are always "oh they're so friendly" and "I love the seafood" and "aww, Highland cows look like teddy bears".

But last June, my wife and I went to Scotland on the sleeper and drove for a week or so in a great loop from Fort William up to Inverness, then across to Aultbea and down into Mull and Oban. It was ridiculously sunny and we had just found out she was pregnant and it was one of the most extraordinary times of my life: emotionally intense and fantastically beautiful. I've been up to Scotland lots in the past, of course, family holidays and work trips and boozy weekends, but this was something special and memorable and… Read More